The Toronto branch of the UJPO was originally housed in the Jewish Workers' Cultural Centre on Brunswick Avenue, just north of Kensington Market, and then for many years in its own building on Christie Street, overlooking Christie Pits. UJPO's headquarters in Montreal were in the Morris Winchevsky Cultural Centre on de l'Esplanade Avenue from 1947 onwards. UJPO Montreal also operated the Morris Winchevsky Yiddish School on Villeneuve Street West and operated summer camps such as the Nitgedeiget. The UJPO headquarters included, as a unique feature, a second story balcony with a five-foot-tall parapet modelled on the balconies in Moscow's Red Square from which Soviet leaders would address the crowd below. On January 27, 1950, the group's Montreal headquarters were closed under the Padlock Law, with boxes of seized books, files and organizational material carted away by the Quebec Provincial Police. Following the raid, the building was sold to the Farband, a Labour Zionist organization, which used the building from 1951 until 1968, with the first floor being occupied by Glatt's, a kosher butcher from 1962 until the 2010s. In 1951, the UJPO was expelled from the Canadian Jewish Congress, not to be re-admitted until 1995. After 1955, Sam Carr, an organizer for the Communist Party of Canada, became active in the UJPO and was elected National Secretary in 1964, a position he would hold until 1986. During the crisis resulting from the release of the Secret Speech in 1956, prominent Party member J. B. Salsberg returned from a trip to the Soviet Union, where he found rampant Party-sponsored antisemitism and suppression of Jewish culture. Salsberg's findings were rejected by the Communist Party and led to his suspension from its leading bodies. Ultimately, the crisis resulted in the departure of the UJPO, Salsberg, Robert Laxer and many of the Party's Jewish members in 1956. In 1959 about one third of the UJPO's membership left to start a new organization called the New Fraternal Jewish Association, feeling that the UJPO was not critical enough of the Soviet Union. In the years following World War II, as the Jewish community moved north along Bathurst Street, the UJPO moved in 1960 to its current location at the Winchevsky Centre in the Bathurst and Lawrence area.
The UJPO has branches in Winnipeg, Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto where it operates the Winchevsky Centre, named after the famed Jewish socialist poet Morris Winchevsky. The Toronto branch sponsors several groups including the Morris Winchevsky School which holds classes at the Bathurst Street Community Centre, the Toronto Jewish Folk Choir, and Camp Naivelt, a socialist Jewish camp in Brampton, Ontario. The Vancouver branch published a national progressive Jewish magazine Outlook, and runs a number of cultural and educational activities. The Jewish Folk Choir held well attended concerts, several of which included Paul Robeson, featuring Yiddish and Hebrew music. Another contribution to music made, indirectly, by the UJPO was the founding of the folk group The Travellers, which originated at Camp Naivelt in the 1950s. Zal Yanofsky spent his childhood years at Camp Naivelt and would later go on to found the Loving Spoonful with John Sebastian in 1964.
